How to Get Organic Traffic for Your Ecommerce Store

Your visitors are getting to your site from paid ads and direct traffic. It’s as if you are completely invisible to Google and Bing. For some reason, search engines aren’t finding you. Getting organic search traffic is a crucial part of any successful online marketing plan. In this article, we’ll explore some Ecommerce SEO best practices that you can put in place today to optimize your store for search engines and grow your business.

What is Ecommerce SEO?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the process of making your website easy to understand for both users and the search robots that crawl your site. Over the past few years, search engines have become a lot more sophisticated. SEO helps search engines like Google and Bing to better understand a website.

A search engine wants to know what your website and its pages are about, and how helpful they may be to people browsing them. Ecommerce SEO puts a specific emphasis on the products and category pages to help users find your site organically through search engines.

Why SEO Matters to Your Business

Not sure if your Ecommerce SEO is necessary for your business? Here are some important facts from to consider from Search Engine Journal:

• 70% of the links search users click on are organic.
• 70–80% of users ignore the paid ads, focusing on the organic results.
• The first organic search result will get 33% of clicks.
• 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results.

Potential customers will search terms or keywords that relate to a product or business. Therefore, as a business owner, your goal is to be the first result on the search results page. If you are not ranking for your desired keywords, you are missing out on potential customers that are looking for what you’re selling.

Isn’t SEO Dead?

A lot of people say that SEO is dead. Many people say that social media posts, YouTube videos, paid advertising, and email marketing are all that matter now. These marketing channels are important to any business, but organic search isn’t going anywhere. Furthermore, unlike paid advertising, SEO can drive low-cost conversions and create new customers that may have never heard of your brand before. By implementing a solid SEO plan you are investing in the long-term success of your business.

SEO Disclaimer

First of all, SEO is not an overnight fix. Effective SEO takes time to develop and can be time-consuming if you’re trying to do it all yourself. Consequently, if you decide to hire a professional to do the work for you, make sure they have a solid track record of happy clients.

SEO Best Practices for Ecommerce

Below are some tips and tricks to optimize your Ecommerce store for search engines. Start here to gain a solid foundation so you can get the most out of your site.

Getting Started — SEO Basics

Before we get started, here is a quick primer of all the SEO terms you will need to know from the Moz Beginner’s Guide:

Title Tag

A title tag is an HTML element that specifies the title of a web page. Title tags are displayed on search engine results pages (SERPs) as the clickable headline for a given result and are important for usability, SEO, and social sharing. The title tag of a web page is meant to be an accurate and concise description of a page’s content.

Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions are HTML attributes that provide concise summaries of web pages. They commonly appear underneath the blue clickable links in a search engine results page (SERP).

Image Filename and Alt Text

Image file names are used to describe the contents of a picture. You want to have a descriptive alt text to help your product images show up when customers search for images.

Alt text (alternative text), also known as “alt attributes”, “alt descriptions,” and colloquially (but technically incorrect) as “alt tags,” are used within an HTML code to describe the appearance and function of an image on a page.

Site Map

Think of a sitemap as a list of files that give hints to the search engines on how they can crawl your website. Sitemaps help search engines find and classify content on your site that they may not have found on their own. Sitemaps also come in a variety of formats and can highlight many different types of content, including video, images, news, and mobile.

Getting Started — Optimization

Now that we have the basics defined we can start to make changes to your Ecommerce store to optimize your site within search engines. There are many parts of your site you can dial in for better SEO. Start with the items below and you will have a solid foundation to grow from.

Title Tags

Set the title tags for your entire store as well as key elements within your site. This includes all pages, products, and collections.

Meta Descriptions

Customize your meta description to align with your marketing message. Meta descriptions can be set for your entire site as well as specific page, blog posts, and collections.

Page Headers (h1)

Your targeted keywords should appear in the h1 tags of your site’s pages, products, collections, and blog posts. Product description

It’s important to include plenty of details and information in your product descriptions. This will increase the odds of your products showing up in searches on Google and Bing.

Targeted Content

Blog posts and supporting pages like the About Us, Collection pages, and Blog posts are ideal places to use keywords and descriptions to enhance your site’s appearance on search engines.

Moving Forward

Remember, potential customers will search keywords that relate to a product or business. Your goal as a business owner is match your product or service with the keywords that fit your business. By making your Ecommerce website more SEO friendly, you are getting a leg up on the competition and gaining access to new organic traffic and customers.